This book makes some often difficult language, and topics, approachable for those willing to learn it.

Makes some often very unapproachable topics and language approachable for those who want to learn it.

This is a simple (though not simpleminded) introduction to the philosophy of mind (includes such topics as "consciousness", "self", "mental phenomena", etc). McGinn writes eloquently and uses interesting metaphors (eg, refers to the brain as "that greyish dumpling"). It is highly recommended to the interested person who wants a comprehensive overview of this lively area of contemporary philosophy.

This text offers an important collection of previously published articles on topics such as a priori knowledge and perceptual knowledge. McGinn's prose style here is clear and rigorous. I highly recommend this text.

I also recommend: Stroud, Quest; Brewer, Perception and Reason; McDowell, Mind and World. Boghossian, New Essays on Apriori...

This work is a criticism of Saul Kripke's work Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. McGinn offers firstly an exegesis of Wittgenstein's position, emphasising that his concerns were predominantly negative rather than positive. The second section of the work deals with Kripke's work. McGinn (p. 68) firstly points out that Wittgenstein, after stating the sceptical paradox, immediately makes it clear that his position is that the paradox arises from a misunderstanding; that is, he does not endorse the conclusion drawn. McGinn then discusses whether Wittgenstein is to be taken as generally sceptical about meaning-related facts (pp. 70-71), concluding that Wittgenstein should be read as proposing a straight solution whereby understanding consists in the fact of having an ability to use signs. McGinn concludes the chapter (pp. 82-92) by criticising Kripke's community conception of rule-following for failing to recognise: Wittgenstein's epistemological naturalism; his emphasis on the blindness or lack of reasons for rule-following; and his emphasis on the equivalence of meaning and use (a distinction that Kripke must exploit for the sceptical paradox to be formulated). McGinn continues in the third chapter to critically analyse Wittgenstein's views. McGinn agrees with Wittgenstein's criticism of inner interpretative states determining meaning, but argues that the role of mental states should not therefore be ruled out entirely, noting (p. 117 n. 33) that "we should preserve the idea that understanding per se is a causal source of use [...] Also, we do not want to pull apart the causal and normative bases of use: what causes use should also be what makes it correct". Overall though, McGinn clearly outlines what he takes to be Wittgenstein's positive position, that meaning "rests ultimately on the bedrock of our natural propensities" (p. 138), and, notwithstanding minor quibbles that are non-essential to its formulation, concurs with it. Finally, McGinn critically analyses Kripke's sceptical solution, offering a variety of objections to both community conceptions of meaning and language modelled on assertability rather than truth conditions.

While my own incliniation is towards a sceptically grounded naturalistic solution to the sceptical paradox, and I find McGinn's attempts to sketch a dispositional account to be highly flawed (refer to the huge amount of secondary literature for the arguments), the real value of the work is the extremely lucid and well-argued exposition of Wittgenstein's main concerns in the Philosophical Investigations, together with the critique of the Kripke interpretation.

This book is an excellent primer on the topic of what McGinn calls logical properties. He has organized chapters on identity, existence, predication, necessity, and truth. I highly recommend this text as well as others: Kripke: Naming and Necessity; Quine: Philosophy of Logic, Methods of Logic; Forbes: Metaphysics of Modality; Salmon: Reference and Essence, Frege's Puzzle.

This text is a decent overview of these topics, eps. on Frege, Russell, and Kripke. The most interesting chs. are on necessity and existence (Soames is the authority on truth).

McGinn argues in favor of existence in terms of a first-order predicate (as opposed to quantificational paraphrase) and rejects identity in strictly quantifiable terms (via Leibniz's law). He sees identity as a primitive relation expressed by a 2-place predicate, which is his take off stance on necessity (possible worlds). At bottom, McGinn rejects a philosopher's 'infatuation' with expressions of modality as strictly quantificational. One may find interest in his arguments for such a rejection.

In this exquisite little book, philosopher McGinn explores fundamental notions of logic and clears away the mist surrounding these notions. Identity is primitive and undefinable; existence is a predicate (!), predicates are more like singular terms than names (!), and "truth" really means something and is not redundant (!). This small text is of particular interest to those interested in analytic philosophy. It's radical and written with extraordinary clarity. Not that it doesn't have parts that can be attacked (what doesn't?), but it is a refreshing re-examination of important logical properties.

Colin McGinn excels as both a writing stylist and lucid thinker. Logical Properties is a brief text in which McGinn re-visits topics that dominated his thinking in the 70s and 80s. The new perspective he brings to these topics (namely, Identity, Existence, Predication, Necessity, and Truth - of course)after venturing off into other areas of philosophy makes this book particularly enlightening.

Caution: it is not for an audience unfamiliar with college level philosophy, but neither is it exceedingly complex.

I place McGinn up there with Hume as a stylist and philosopher.

Dr. McGinn's book is aimed at the philosophical ameature -- he presupposes no familiarity with ethics or philosophical thought beyond that which a normal person picks up in daily life. The book, in its eight chapters, is a quick and easy read. This is a book for the layman who is unaccostomed to thinking as a philosopher; more experienced philosophers will be disappointed by his glossing over of some of the juicier points. "...but that's just philosophy" is a phrase McGinn uses to ignore a question or argument. That's good for keeping focus on real-world applications, but frustrating for someone with more experience.

That's not to say that a philosophically-minded person has no reason to read this book. McGinn's perspectives on abortion, sex, drugs, etc. are certainly worth reading and will stimulate thought in any reader.

McGinn's thinking is heavily influenced by virtue ethics, which disappointed me, but I hear that a lot of people go for that sort of thing.

Short books seem to be a trend these days. This book is good and short, but it's packed full of all sorts of interesting stuff on how to think about morality and reasonably think about important moral issues. The writing style is fun and conversational. Very good!

I am currently aspiring to gain a bachelors degree in philosophy and this book is a great way to grasp fundamental theories. I'm becoming more and more interested in field of philosophy that seem so daunting. I'm glad a book like this was written to show the minority of people out there what the trials toward a career in academia and philosophy is really like. (Almost makes me want to transfer to Rutgers.)

"I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance."--Socrates

All too often, philosophers write in an arcane, esoteric language baffling to laypersons untrained in the discipline. The layperson's reaction to reading such perceived mumbo-jumbo is typically "Say what?" or "So what?"

In The Making of a Philosopher, Colin McGinn seeks to rescue philosophy from its ivory tower, bring it down to earth, and explain it in an accessible, engaging way. He is only partially successful; some sections of his book remain tough sledding.

McGinn, 52, was born in West Hartlepool, county Durham, a small mining town in the northeast of England. He was educated at the Univ. of Manchester and Oxford Univ. He now lives in New York City and is a Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers.

An analytical philosopher dealing with language and logic, McGinn traces his philosophical lineage from Plato and Aristotle, through Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant, to Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein--a tradition that emphasizes clarity, rigor, argument, theory, and truth.

"It is not a tradition," he writes, "that aims primarily for inspiration or consolation or ideology. Nor is it particurlary concerned with 'philosophy of life"--though parts of it are. This kind of philosophy is more like science than religion, more like mathematics than poetry--though it is neither science nor mathematics."

As an academic philosopher, McGinn has been interested mainly in epistemology, linguistic analysis, and cognitive science. Alas, in The Making of a Philosopher, he does not even mention my two favorite philosophers, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, nor does he deal with Eastern philosophy, other representatives of Continental philosophy, or post-modern philosophy.

McGinn is probably best known as the author of a provocative essay, "Can the Mind-Body Problem Be Solved?" (which is by far the most cited, reprinted, and translated paper he has ever written). His answer to this question is no. "We aren't god, after all," he writes; "we are recently evolved organisms made of pretty low-tech materials. Our human intelligence is not cut out for the job" [of solving such knotty problems.

"Maybe the human species cannot be expected to understand," he writes, "how the universe contains mind and matter in combination. Isn't it really a preposterous overconfidence on our part to think that our species--so recent, so contingent, so limited in many ways--can nevertheless unlock every secret of the natural world?"

In my opinion, the "linguistic turn" that characterized 20th-century philosophy was unfortunate, leading to a dry, dreary, and dull wasteland. And, apparently, McGinn himself would agree. After spending many years as an analytic philosopher, he has now turned his energies to connecting philosophical concepts with "real life" and making philosophy accessible to educated laypersons.

In discussing metaphilosophy--the philosophy of philosophy--McGinn points out that philosophy is not an exact science and can never attain the certainty of mathematics or the clarity of logic. The closer we get to philosophy, the more problematical it becomes.

"Philosophy must now be admitted," he writes, "to be a condition of terminal puzzlement, a permanent fretting ignorance." One should not be daunted or discouraged, however, by this insight, for as Socrates always maintained, it is the wise man who knows his own ignorance.

The Making of a Philosopher is a candid work revealing that philosophy can be a passionate and exciting pursuit. Writing with intelligence and humor, the author pulls no punches concerning the strong and weak points of his chosen field. And the narrative flows smoothly: not many academic philosophers can write this well.

Colin McGinn is the author of thirteen previous books, including The Mysterious Flame, The Character of Mind, The Problem of Consciousness, and Ethics, Evil, and Fiction.

Colin McGinn is a genius, the star of Rutgers'all-star philosophy department and best known for his "mysterian" position on the problem of consciousness. In a word, McGinn thinks that the problem of "consciousness in a materal world" is that mind is not subject to the laws of space and time -- I can imagine myself in Paris, think back to when I was 7 years old, look forward to when I will be 80, etc -- while our perceptual apparatus is strictly determined by the spatio-temporal world into which we were born as physical beings. This isn't mystical or religious claptrap, but a rigorous account of what McGinn calls "cognitive closure": the spatio-temporal limitations on our perception put us, in relation to our own consciousness, much like a color-blind person in a world of color. The color is there, but we have an apparatus that will never be able to perceive it. Thus we perceive the world WITH our mind, but we will never be able to understand WHAT that "mind" is that does the perceiving: we can't, so to speak, get behind it to make it an object of our perception, and even if we could, it is different in kind from the things we can actually perceive. McGinn takes great pains to make clear that he is an atheist and that this is a "naturalistic" explanation, something like a indeterminacy proof in mathematics.

But that's not the thrill of McGinn's book. The thrill is that he was born into a family of British coal miners with the mind of a genius. The story of how he makes his way through a provincial university (in psychology), and then to Oxford, and finally to Rutgers and the world's leading philosophy department is pure Horatio Alger, except that it's told entirely in terms of the IDEAS that McGinn became absorbed in at the different stages of his philosophical development. Since he's the world's clearest writer, anybody can understand these problems and ideas -- it's like being given a personal tour of 20th century philosophy by a guide who can make you understand every philsophical problem and position as well as if you had his own mind.

The only parts of the book I had reservations about were the early section of McGinn's infatuation with Bertrand Russell, whom I consider a reptile as a person and simply shallow and "clever" as a philosopher, and the section at the end where he takes to dropping names of movie actresses and opera singers he's gotten to know since he became famous. One wants to believe that someone with a mind like McGinn's has a little more austere sense of self than this People magazine bedazzlement with empty-headed celebrities. (He mocks himself for all this name-dropping, but that doesn't help matters.)

But those are tiny reservations. If you want a first-rate course in 20th century philosophy that reads like a detective story, you should buy this book and read it and reread it. (I've now read it three times.) The decision to embed philsophical problems and analysis in the narrative of a young working-class Brit's rise from the mining pits to the heights of 21st century philosophy was brilliant. This is as close as non-philosophers will every get to what top-level analytic philosophy looks and feels like from the inside.

McGinn's thesis is very interesting, and he does a relatively good job of arguing for it, but he could have made a much stronger case for why "supernaturalistic" accounts of consciousness must be ruled out. Although I am a naturalist, I don't think it is fair to just assume that alternate accounts would destroy the whole project of trying to understand the world.

As the dualism/materialism debate has raged on in philosophy and philosophers gloat privately that they've solved the problem, it is rare to see one willing to throw their hands in the air. Mcginn, although having written what in the end is a repetitive and self-defeating book, has made an admirable and somewhat enjoyable attempt to explain his partial surrender to hope of ultimate answers in philosophy of mind.

Mcginns theory, in an nutshell is that, while we can view the brain only from outside, we, at least so far, have only been able to see the mind from the inside. From this, he concludes that we can not connect the two views i.e., even if we know that certain neural patterns cause certain sensations, this only explains THAT there is a particular connection, not HOW those neurons create the sensation. The middle ground needed to transition the two views, Mcginn argues, is inaccessable to human consciousness.

It is here that Mcginn takes it too far, even though he is correct to remind us that we've no reason to expect that every concievable question has an answer accessable to human consciousness. He even reminds us that, as evolutionary creatures, our minds, like every other organ, were evolved to solve our ancestors problems. Why, from that standpoint, should we then expect that the human mind is capable of understanding itself? My answer would be that just as we have no reason to suspect that we can successfully answer the problem, we have no reason to suspect that we can't.

To make matters worse, explaining the theory the first time is not good enough. With slight variation, every chapter restates his theory with equal vigor. Even the discussions of the sections dispelling pansychism and dualism (with and without god) are given short treatment in favor of correspondingly lengthy explanations of why Mcginns theory is to be favored.

What good I can say is that this book is probably one of the best intros to tht philosophy of mind outside of Pinkers "How the Mind Works" and Dennett and Hofstadter's "The Minds I." For the more experienced, Read Mcginns (and for counterpoint, John Searle's) academic work.

Colin McGinn's The Mysterious Flame inspired me in both a scientific and philosophical view of the world. From my experience of reading many other philosophical books, this one stood out because of its unique style of getting the point across. The book is written so everyone can enjoy it, even though it addresses a complex idea. McGinn attempts to explicate the idea of consciousness within a world of materialism by using many examples and similes. He views the concept from a scientific view as well as a hypothetical perspective. By the end of each chapter, the reader grasps of one's own view and is left eternally thinking. McGinn's well organized and constituted form approaches the reader gently with the idea, so it doesn't seem very confusing or disturbing at first. Then as the reader is well developed about the objective, McGinn progresses to more in depth. This book disputes the very perplexing notion between consciousness (something we can't see) and our brain, a peace of meat (something visible). He mentions how if a human brain were placed in a monkey's environment, it would come out with a monkey's mind. This is the basic concept of how the mind is adopted by the brain's atmosphere. The relationship between the mind and the brain is a very extensive sentiment, and it is remarkable how McGinn successfully establishes the argument. Astonishingly never was I confused about anything in any of McGinn's chapters. Since he took time to explain each factor of consciousness independently, there were no mix-ups with other aspects of consciousness. McGinn rather accomplished his goal of seeking the reader to continue reading. It is very possible-especially for philosophical books such as this-to become tedious and the reader to simply discontinue reading. McGinn writes this book for people who just enjoy reading and not for special scientists or high league philosophers. That is what makes this book so special, that the average person could read it, and understand a concept not so average. Just the title alone attracts the common book shopper. The Mysterious Flame represents how it is impossible to find the truth about the relationship between the brain and the mind. This is why it is so mysterious, and we can only argue about it. In fact McGinn does mention our intelligence is not enough and we are incapable to unravel the mystery. McGinn discusses possibilities of consciousness in machines to illustrate how if mindfulness could exist in a meat matter, it is conceivable that it may also exist in springs, gears, and pulleys to assist us in various tasks. He doesn't leave out anything that would ever concern consciousness, it's what makes this book so complete. There is a limit of how much realism and imagination a philosophical book such as this should contain. Another aspect of what creates this book such a success is how McGinn well balanced the amount of realistically versus the imaginative fantastical things. Just because a book is theoretical, it doesn't mean there is no limit of how much sense it has to make. Even though McGinn discusses issues that are never possible or unrealistic, it makes sense. All and all, McGinn's accomplishment of The Mysterious Flame was a success. Like two different sides of the same coin, are the brain and the mind. McGinn analyzes the relationship of consciousness and materialism from every perspective, a chapter for each angle of view. This book is for the average Joe as well as it is for a philosophy professor. Satisfaction and enjoyment is guaranteed.

Nearly all of the texts I've read concerning the subject of consciousness are marred by their overtones of scientific hubris; they invoke symbol manipulation and algorithmic, multi-track neurochemical processes as the ultimate explanations for the hidden substrate of our introspective awareness. Now, along comes Colin McGinn with a carefully reasoned, head-clearing breath of philosophic fresh air. His analyses of "cognitive closure" (namely, that evolution has not furnished our minds with the faculties necessary to solve the mind-body problem) and the non-spatial character of spatial awareness are both incisive and humbling. McGinn takes a firm stand in declaring consciousness to be grounded in the material world. Yet, as can be seen in his discussions of free will and death, he refuses to interpret this fact in a reductionistic or fatalistic fashion: we simply do not - and never will - have the capacity to understand how "meat" can be conscious. In reading "The Mysterious Flame," I was struck particularly by McGinn's brevity, clarity, and persuasiveness in presenting his arguments as well as his sparing use of jargon (although his text does tend to be repetitive at times). The reader also comes away with a sense of McGinn's intriguing personality and foibles (he's obviously a fan of science fiction). Of all the books I've read on this subject, and I have read many - including one with the rather pompous title "Consciousness Explained", this one was easily the best.

If there's one thing I learned from studying literature, it's that ethics are comprised by social context; and the context in a novel is largely CONTRIVED by its author. In an age of postmodern criticism then, it is shocking to find this sort of flat, naive, victorian interpretation. Moral realism. Yikes.

Prior to reading this work I had only read works by C. McGinn on the philosophy of mind. McGinn is a first rate philosopher and his foray into ethics is further proof of his talent. His method of analysis in this volume is quite interesting and contemporary. It should be a useful addition to the bookshelves of anyone seriously interested in ethical thinking.